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Recent News & Updates

On a thankfully uneventful Friday the 13th, another team of Dickinson researchers drove to Washington, D.C., to continue scanning student files at the National Archives (NARA). Three student interns - Linda Genser, Rachel Kruchten, and Michele Metcalf - as well as Friends of the Library Intern Caitlin Moriarty, will be at NARA for two weeks. In addition to scanning, all are looking forward to visiting various D.C. landmarks such as Eastern Market and Ben's Chili Bowl. After returning from D.C., Linda, Rachel, and Michele will work at the Dickinson College Archives for the remainder of June and July, continuing to process scanned materials for the website.

Project co-leaders Susan Rose and Malinda Triller Doran will travel to Austin, TX to give a presentation about the Digital Resource Center at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Conference held May 28-31. NAISA is the "premiere international and interdisciplinary professional organization for scholars, graduate students, independent researchers, and community members interested in all aspects of Indigenous Studies." Last year's conference attracted almost 900 attendees. We have created a brief flyer describing the project, which Rose and Triller Doran will also distribute during the conference.

We are pleased to add a new photograph to our collection of Carlisle Indian School images, thanks to the generosity of James Herster. This photograph depicts a group of 15 student printers in school uniforms circa 1888. This image, along with the names and tribes of those pictured, is now available on our site. We want to thank Mr. Herster for his generosity in donating this image to our collection.

On Wednesday, March 12, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School digital project was a featured story on the local news. Reporter Alex Hoff, with Harrisburg TV station ABC27, interviewed several of the people involved in the project, including undergraduate interns Frank Vitale and Xueyin Zha, Professor Susan Rose, local historian Barbara Landis, and Native American...

We are pleased to announce the launching of new search pages to the website. Visitors to this Carlisle Indian School site now have the ability to search more specifically within each individual content type rather than only being able to search across the entire online collection. These new search capabilities are available for the Student Files, the Images, and the Publications. Just click on any of those three links from the navigation bar on the left, and you will see the new layout. The right side of the screen features a search box that combines keyword searching with additional options to limit your results by categories such as nation, date, or content format. The lower part of the screen will allow basic browsing using those same...

In order to make the "recent news & updates" section of our website easy to find, and in order to make the appearance of the site more visually appealing, we have launched an update to the look of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School project homepage. We now have a much shorter introductory text to the project positioned right in the center of the page, with a slideshow of select images on the righthand side. Blog entries providing updates on the project or other useful and interesting tidbits are provided just below the introductory text and slideshow. We hope our users will like these changes to the homepage, and we look forward to rolling out some other new looks and capabilities for the website in the coming weeks.

For two weeks in mid-January, a second group of researchers undertook a trip to the National Archives in Washington, DC to continue scanning the student files of those who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Tessa Cicak and Katie Walters, special projects assistants at the Waidner-Spahr Library, and Caitlin Moriarty, Friends of the Library Intern in the College Archives, were able to scan 1,550 more student files comprising more than 16,000 pages of documentation. After adding these to what was completed during last summer's research trip, almost half of the student files have now been scanned.

Tessa, Katie, and Caitlin enjoyed the experience of traveling to D.C. and doing research in the beautiful reading room of the National Archives. Throughout the fall, all three had...

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School digital humanities project received some attention recently, and comments and questions from new visitors to the project’s website have been rolling in ever since. The interest was sparked by a short article in the online publication “Indian Country Today.” Rick Kearns, author of the piece, spoke with the project’s three co-directors back in December, and he felt that a wide audience would be excited to learn about this new online resource. The article was posted on January 10, alerting an interested user community to our activities just as a team of interns arrived in Washington, DC to scan more documents (...

In an effort to share more information about our ongoing progress with the Carlisle Indian Industrial School project, we have decided to launch a blog that will be available on our homepage.

This project began in earnest only 8 months ago, with a team of three making a two-day visit to the U.S. National Archives in Washington, DC to test some workflows with scanners and laptops, and to capture page images from larger ledgers using digital photography. A two-week visit followed in late May and early June, with a research team of four scanning the contents of nearly 2000 student files.

The members of these research teams, along with other interns and project workers, have been processing these scanned documents to make them ready for the website in the months since their...